How to Determine if a Latitude E6400 is Throttling

How to Determine if a Latitude E6400 is Throttling

Intel processor's use SpeedStep and C-State technologies that are designed to reduce the processor speed when it is at idle and will step the speed back up when needed. This process is normal and not to be confused with processor throttling that occurs when a certain processor temperature is exceeded.

Throttling should lower the processor speed until the core temperature is reduced. What is not normal is when the system does not return to normal processor speeds when the temperature goes below the threshold limit. Because the processor is at 100% utilization and is performing slow, does not mean that the processor is throttling.

To determine the current processor frequency, you can do the following:

Click on Start in the bottom left corner. In the Search Box, you can type RUN and hit enter. You should get a RUN box, here you can type PERFMON and hit enter (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Open Processor performance as detailed in the screenshot below (Figure 2).

Figure 2

If the processor utilization goes to 100%, the speed will as well. If the speed drops but the utilization does not, then that is an example of throttling. In the following screen shot, it will demonstrate normal operation. The processor load is increased to 75% and then turned back off (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Solution

Use Windows System Monitor to determine if CPU throttling is occurring.

Use Windows System Monitor to determine if CPU throttling is occurring.